


The woods (where the wolves know to find you)

by Pandora



Category: Rotkäppchen | Little Red Riding Hood (Fairy Tale)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-08
Updated: 2015-07-08
Packaged: 2018-04-08 10:05:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4300623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pandora/pseuds/Pandora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"She knew the worst wolves are hairy on the inside."  [Angela Carter, "The Company of Wolves."]</p>
            </blockquote>





	The woods (where the wolves know to find you)

It isn't easy to find the house inside the forest. I can’t see it from the path, even when I know it isn’t far ahead, only the towering, door-creaking spruce trees that have grown up all around it. I have to leave the main path right before the place where it splits, one half leading back down to the highway, for a narrow trail of raindamp dirt and rotted tree wood. After a few minutes, I will see the house appear as a dirtysnow blur between the trees just ahead. It is small enough to be called a cottage, with a screened in porch, and a wall of logs cut into firewood stacked along one side.

My grandmother split it herself when she lived there, before she fell and a dry branch bone in her right leg snapped. She might still go back—but for now, she lives in the guest room, with its princess sized bed and carnation petal carpet, at my parents’ house.

No one (my mother said, with an amused sighing laugh, to a friend on the other end of the telephone) could want to _live there_. You’d have to be half wild—and of course, you know what they used to say about my father. But Mother--

But I’m not wild, or even half-wild, and I know that. When I walk through the damp soft darkness at night, and especially when I stop and look up to see the silver knife-blade moon hanging in the trees, I wish I were, but I don’t know how. You should know that, before you know anything else about me.

The paths runs through the woods just behind my parents’ backyard. It was here when the first houses of the village were built, back in the wise, good, long ago days. I have to use it to know where I am as I walk through the forest, but he doesn’t. He only uses it when it suits its whim. When he needs to follow it to find something he wants.

\--

Louisa told me she had seen him when she stopped by to see me after her shift at work. She leaned forward, with a flushed, giggling-sly smile, so I knew she had a secret she thought I might like. I couldn’t be sure that I actually would. We had been acquaintances, rather than friends, in school, but she sounded pleased to hear me when she called, several says after I came back to my parents’ house—only to visit, only for the summer holidays. I wondered about that, but not enough to ask. She wore a rose-print chiffon skirt that hardly covered her pale, milk-cold thighs, even though it had been raining for most of the day. I had just put on a sweater, and I was still cold.

I had told her about him after I met him for the first time, in the forest where my grandmother lived. You’ll know more about that soon enough.

When she told me, in a gossiping rush, _You will never believe who I saw at Cuppa Joe yesterday_ , I think I surprised her when I said: --You saw the Wolf?

\--Yeah, I saw him. It wasn’t even for a minute, and I don’t think he noticed me, she said, looking at the shivering grey rain outside. Then she looked back at me, and picked up her glass of iced tea. –I wonder what he was up to.

\--You probably don’t want to know, I said. 

But I was distracted, and that was really just meaningless, thoughtless words. I thought of him—his sharp wolf canines that I had only seen when he smiled. I crossed my legs together too tight. I took a sip from my glass of diet free, taste free, soda my mother likes to buy. It tasted of rainwater, of melted ice cubs, and then of nothing.

\--

It might be odd, but it’s still true: I’m not quite certain what his name is. That isn’t because he hadn’t given me a name. He did--the second time we met, away from the woods. I had just gotten out of school for day in the nearest, _real_ , town, and he was at my bus stop. I was too surprised to recognize him at first. (He had returned to the City, miles and hours away, and I might have made him up anyhow.) He stayed several polite, and safe, feet away from me. His hair had grown out enough for him to tie it in a ponytail, and his eyes were bruised with smeared black makeup.

I knew he stared at me when I told him I didn’t know his name, but he only twitched his mouth into a smile. –I’m sure I introduced myself. It would have been terribly rude of me if I hadn’t.

A car went past, the tires slapping over the damp pavement. It would start raining as I rode the bus down the highway between the towering glossybright green trees. I wore the dull black raincoat I still have. He wore a natty cinnamon brown wool suit, and his mouth was pale and chapped. He held a closed up black umbrella under his arm. I’m not sure why I remember that one detail.

\--I don’t think you did, I said (though I had to wonder if I had only forgotten, even if it didn’t seem possible. And my grandmother must have addressed him by name—)

He couldn’t have moved. But I felt, as I hadn’t before, how warm he was, and the dried leaf smell of his suit. He wore several bracelets on his left wrist, and a thin bridal silver ring. I wanted to touch him, and I knew—oh, I knew quite well—I wouldn’t. He told me what his name was. It might actually be what other people call him, but I can only think of him as the wolf. You’ll see why.

Then he looked away and said: --Your bus is coming.

The next bus wasn’t scheduled to stop for another five minutes, but when I looked after him, it was lumbering down the road, its destination flashing in lighting-glow neon.

\--

I had been back at my parents’ home, back home, for over three weeks, the summer after my first year at university. But I won’t go into that—the city, the campus, the dorm and my small room with its scuffed school hallway and cafeteria linoleum floor. Oh, I had wanted to go there, to the school I chose, but I also knew that I had made decent grades, mostly lower As, and the occasional B+, even if I didn’t feel all that intelligent, and that was what I was supposed to do. It was what you just did. I studied (and felt the words seethe inside the books when I didn’t) and walked past this popular ohsohip coffeeshop several blocks away from campus. I could have gone inside, but I always knew I wouldn’t.

Once I stopped on the sidewalk and looked at the window. The worker, a girl with dyed hyacinth-purple hair and a diamond stud in her nose, had been wiping down one of the little glossy black tables when she looked up and back at me.

I stared (for a moment in which I may have looked crazed, and wild, after all) before I walked off in a quick, nervous-stiff lurch.

But now, I was back in my old bedroom. Most of my clothes were still heaped up in the suitcase I left on the floor, including the ones I’d washed. I had brought back several books, intending to read them, but I had only finished the first few chapters of one of them. The shortest one, too. The other books were still buried in the suitcase under several skirts, still folded together, I was too cold to wear.

That day, my grandmother was standing at the window when I came into the sitting room. The television was on, the sound turned down to a mumble, and she had left her mostly full sour-black cup of coffee next to my mother’s newest antique estate sale lamp. She wore peachpale pink lounging pants my mother had gotten her, and that I doubted she would have worn before. But she still had her endlessly long cigarette-smoke hair. She hadn’t braided it, and it was in a sleep-tossed mess.

(There were several times when she had leapt from amongst the trees behind her house to see me, her bark-brown skirt dusted with sawdust, her long braids flapping against her back. I had started, suddenly too tall and sweating-warm, and once I yelped in the flash before I knew her. But she couldn’t do that anymore.)

My mother came in, and looked around the room until she saw Grandma. We only lived three miles away from the house my grandfather had built for her, and she could see the path from that window. I should mention that she had tried to go back several times—and those were only the times they had told me about. Once, the second time, she left when it was still dark and cold outside, and she had almost made it. I knew, though it was really a guess, that she would try again. I don’t have to say what my mother thought.

But then: she couldn’t leave when I was in the same room, and when she knew my mother was watching, and worried, nearby.

My mother straightened a cream-white knitted doily on the top bookshelf. Grandma didn’t move. My mother’s mouth clenched tight, but she made her voice sound plump and soft when she said: --Sit down, Mother. You’re making me nervous.

My grandmother looked at her, but only for a second, before she turned back to staring, and longing, and pining, at the path through the trees. Her eyes were as blank and waterpale as the window glass. She hadn’t seen me at all. That had surprised me when I first came home, before my mother told me she expected me to help guard her, and I knew what she must have overheard them saying. But I had gotten used to it.

\--Do you want anything, Grandma? I said. I made certain to sound as bored, as careless as I could manage, as though I wouldn’t even hear her answer.

She mumbled, the way she always did when I spoke to her.

My mother followed me into the kitchen. She washed the breakfast dishes while I stood nearby, eating the last of the poppy seed muffins she had gotten at the bakery. –You should go and check in on Grandma’s house.

\--I don’t know, I said. There was a grey pounding-hard rain outside, and the thick, well tended grass in the backyard was a velvetsoft green. I slapped the muffins crumbs off my trousers. I don’t need to say that I had already thought of him. But I could only imagine him now as a dream-faded blur. After Louisa told me she had seen him, the words she used had disappeared. I remembered what she had said, but not the actual words.

He had looked away from me that last time, and I had only the echo of his strange black hole voice as he said: _Your bus is coming_.

And besides that, I had gone into the woods numerous times after I first met him. I had visited my grandmother more than a few of those times. I learned (after several excited, nervously-flushed, _stupid_ ) letdowns, that he wouldn’t be there.

\--You know how your grandmother goes on about that place, my mother said. –And your father has only intended _for several months now_ to go and make sure it’s still standing. But of course, he’s so busy, he can’t ever seem to manage it.

I shrugged, and crammed the last of the muffin in my mouth. But I didn’t have anything else, better or worse, I could do, and she knew it. Louisa was busy working full time shifts at her waitressing job, so I couldn’t even spend time with her. I didn’t know anyone else I could even tolerate. –I’ll think about it.

\--Good, my mother said, in her broom-whisking voice.

Later, after she went to the grocery store, and I had gone back to my room, and had started on the next chapter of the book I was reading, I realized I did want to go. I hadn’t been in the woods since that one day during my midwinter break. I could use the house as an excuse to get away for more than a short walk. You might not believe me, but I didn’t think of him. I didn’t see the point. He hadn’t been there for years.

\--

I saw him only a week after that at the beach. He had his hair loose, and wore old painter black trousers and a rain-grey t-shirt. I watched him come towards me as I moved, in a carefully slow balance, across the dumped pile of salt-damp logs. He looked so slender, even delicate, more so than I had remembered. His skin was moonlight pale, and the trousers were sagging down around his knife-stabbing hipbones. He watched me as I jumped from one of the last logs onto the heaps of water polished stones, and:

(It would be different, I thought. _It would have to be_. I might have been a tall little girl, _a kid_ , the first time we met, but I wasn’t anymore.)

\--Hullo, Ariane, he said.

I must have nodded in return. –I didn’t expect to see you here.

\--Then I can only hope it was a pleasant surprise, he said, and he almost, teasingly almost, smiled at me. The wind shook my hair across my face. I had dyed it a midnight-dark blue during a recent long, boring, frozen-silent afternoon, but it was mostly back to its usual color, a dull honey-blonde. I wore jeans with a new hole in the right knee for walking around on the beach, and rolling up to walk out into the waves. I hadn’t expected I would want to care what I looked like.

It was low tide, but the waves were breaking close to shore. Another wave came down in a hard exhaled smack, and the water slid toward me, and I had to step back. Then it slid back out again, leaving a few last lace bubbles behind.

I tried not to show what I felt as I caught up with him. He wasn’t much taller than I was—that hadn’t changed. He smelled like rain and faded musk cologne, and I could see the violet veins in his right wrist. His bruised-blue nail polish was chipped. He still had green-gold eyes, a color I hadn’t quite remembered correctly. He still looked delicate, but I knew better than to believe it.

I had to look away from, at the crowded dark trees overhead. –I suppose that’s where you came from.

\--That would be telling, he said. He leaned in so closely I could feel his breath while he spoke. I couldn’t breathe for a moment, but I was ready. He moved his hand over my cheek, in a whispersoft touch, and I leaned towards him. He smiled.

Then he kissed me, so hard, so bruising and mean, that I don’t know how I managed to kiss him back. But I did, and I pushed my tongue into his mouth first. He liked that. I fluttered my hand over his hip, before I touched him, and moved over onto his arse. He pulled me closer against him, and then—

That was when I felt his teeth. He started by only nipping my lower lip, and then he bit down. It hurt (and I know I must have gasped out, if only from the surprise) but only for that instant, and not in a way that I minded.

Then he pressed his forehead against mine, and he said, so close I could feel it inside my own mouth: --I’m sorry for that. I should have been more careful.

\--I’ll tell you when you need to apologize, I said. I don’t know what he would said in response, or even if he would have, because I kissed him again.

When I looked in the mirror that night, I saw the sore he had bitten into my lip, that I had only felt and bumped with my tongue. It was a slight cherrycandy swelling, but enough for my parents to have noticed it. They hadn’t said anything.

After he left, I walked on down the beach. I watched the ocean move, a flock of ducks moving up and down with one swaying-long wave. I wouldn’t go out into the safer, shallow ones that day. The water was still too cold for me. A couple passed me, the woman carrying an empty plastic bucket; I nodded and twitched my mouth back when they nodded at me. I touched the dull-sore throb on my lip where he had bitten me. I wished—now that it was over, and too late—that I had thought to bite him first.

\--

There is one thing I have to remember: the woods, the spaces between and around the trees, are not safe.

\--

You know. I don’t usually see any animals (a shuffling shadow-dark bear, or a puma, or yes—a wolf) but they will see me and smell me as soon as I come close enough, on the path or crashing through the brush just off it. Last year, my cat went into the woods, the way she had endless times before, and she never came back. I looked for days, even though I knew better, trying to see her creampale form in the tree shadow dark. My voice was so small it got lost in the glass-heavy air as I called and called her name, until it wasn’t a name anymore, or a word, only a sound.

It has occurred to me that he might have done it: caught her when he was a wolf, and she was a small slinky-fast animal he could turn into meat. It wouldn’t have been personal. I know that, but that isn’t the reason I will never ask him.

But despite, and after, that, I’m not actually afraid out there. I’ve lived here most of my life, and so I don’t think I can be. After all—and I knew this even before my father told me—that sort of thing happens when you live here with the forest.

\--

Several weeks after my mother made her suggestion, I walked down the path into the forest to the house my grandmother had, only recently, lived in. I left early, before the sunshine became too hot and glaring-bright, and it was basement-dark and cool under the shadows of the towering spruce trees. The ferns were still shiny with dewbreath, and there was a fading, muddy, night smell. I wore the long black skirt I had just gotten from my suitcase, though I wore it with practical combat boots. I carried my old dulled-grey bag over my shoulder, with a plastic bottle of water still cold from the faucet.

I had expected my mother to say something about my skirt. But she only watched me while I filled the water bottle, and then turned back to her mug of tea. My grandmother stared at the television in the sitting room. My father had already left for work in another, well worked over, part of the forest.

The path was smooth and flat when I started out, with only the occasional scattered rock and snake twisted tree root. I hadn’t been this far for over a year (since shortly after I stopped looking for my cat, but I didn’t want to think about that), and I looked, really, intently looked, around as I walked, even though I knew what I would see.

The forest stayed still around me. The heat was beginning to burn through the tree branches, but everything was still brightdamp and green, from the ferns and the velvetfurry moss on the trees’ rough bark skin. The trees here were spruces and hemlocks, with huge knobby-kneed roots. I noticed the plants growing from the crushed, rotting bones of the dead trees on the floor. I still remembered the way my father explained the way that worked to me, when I was so little I toddled to keep up with him. A bird leapt into the sky with a rustle of its wings, but otherwise, it was quiet.

I could hear the creek, as a muffled whisper and then a slippery-loud laughing rush, before I came around a turn and saw the silverbright water below, moving down the last ten miles to the ocean. I stopped for a moment and looked down at it. Its voice had turned into a heartbeat-roar. The walls above it were covered with wet ferns fluttering their leaves.

A mosquito, the first one of the day, whined around my ear, and I shook and jerked my head away before I went on.

It was already warmer, and becoming more so, the light like a thick soggyheavy blanket. I could feel the sunlight burning-warm in my hair. I followed the path down towards the creek, and then over the old fadedgrey wooden foot bridge. The road was nearby, on the other side of the trees. A pickup came thudding past, and then there was only the sound of the creek’s whisperingvoice. I was alone again.

I touched the place on my lower lip where the bite had been. It had healed and faded away in only a few days. The fingerprint bruises on my left hip (I didn’t know how he had done that—which meant I didn’t know if he would do it again) were gone as well.

_You’ll feel it when I bite you_ , he said once—though not to me.

And yes: I didn’t know everything he had intended with that quite yet.

After I took several sips from my water bottle, I adjusted the strap of my bag over my shoulder, and went on. The path turned narrow here as it moved uphill. The creek faded into a murmur behind me. I didn’t hurry. But I didn’t stay at the slow, daydreaming pace my father and grandmother always liked. I stopped another time to drink from my water bottle near a tree with its thick root stretched out across the path. I couldn’t be certain, but it looked like the place where I had seen him for the first time.

\--

That had been one of the first days of autumn. I had gone, after I finished enduring my first week back at school, to see my grandmother. I started, and I knew it, when he came out onto the path from the amongst the nearby trees. I had just passed several other people on their way back towards the village, but they had been local day hikers—ordinary, and safe. He was different. He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a gauzy lavender-purple scarf and slouching, dull black pants I could tell only looked secondhand. He had green eyes. He smelled like the trees behind him. He pushed his hair behind his ear, and smiled at me, but I only managed to stare back.

I was fourteen. You might say I was only fourteen, still in grade eight at the one room village school. I couldn’t tell how old he was, but I did know that he was too old, and too much, for me.

\--Hullo, he said, using the most ordinary, expected greeting. That was when I saw his wolf-sharp canines for the first time.

I didn’t intend to, but my voice came out muddythick and slow when I said, in return, --Hullo. But he didn’t seem to mind if he noticed that.

We walked along together up the path. I had never seen him before (I couldn’t have, because I would never have forgotten him) but he looked around as though he recognized, and knew, what he saw. I won’t go into what we said, though I do remember most of it. It only mattered at that time. The air shivered between us, but he never—alas, even when the path narrowed on a rock ledge, never—came too close.

Then, after what must have only been ten minutes, he looked over at me, and his voice changed into a teasing sing-song: --There are several ways to get to your grandmother’s house, you know. This is far from the best one.

\--Wait a minute, I said (and this is where I should have turned stumbling-numb with fear, where I should have started to back off. I knew the rules). –I never told you I was going to see my grandmother.

\--Oh, she did, he said, in the most casually easy voice. He would. –I can see that she forgot to mention something to you.

\--Obviously, I said. I didn’t move or look away from him. A chainsaw gnashed its teeth off in the distance. –You do know I’ve got no reason to believe you.

He only shrugged. –You’ll find out soon enough. But— (I shook my head, as I heard the same all-knowing, scolding: _When men look at girls, young and innocent and stupid girls, they only see two tits and a hole_.) --as I was about to say. I know another way, and I can get there before you do.

\--Really, I said. Then I think I’m going to have to beat you.

\--You’d best get on that then, he said.

That was when I turned and ran, because I did want to beat him. You might not believe me, but I have never had much interest in teasing. I was serious, and it was true. The trees and sunlight blurred out around me. When a stitch gnawed across my side, I had to slow down, but I didn’t stop moving. I came to the place where the trail split in half, and turned, sweat-sticky, breathing in pants, down the hidden in the tree shadows. Then the white house flashed ahead between the trees. I couldn’t see him. I’m sure I was smiling.

\--

The house had become to slump in since the last time I had been there. I noticed, as I walked up, that the dingy old white paint was cracking and coming off in flakes. My mother kept it locked up, and I found the key where my grandmother had always kept it, under the front doormat. The air inside glittered with snow-soft dust. The smooth wooden floors were cleared off for a dance, and as I walked through the room, I saw the bone-gleam of the porcelain sink through the cracked open bathroom door, and the twisted staircase my grandfather copied from an old fairy tale illustration going up into the shadows. The air was stale and warm, which I had expected—the house had been closed up for months.

But I also thought I smelled a faint lilac-sweet smell, that could only be perfume. I didn’t believe it. My mother would have been the last person there, and she never used scented hand lotions, let alone perfume.

I looked around the rest of the rooms downstairs before I went back outside, and around the side of the house to the crowded little backyard. The grass had grown shaggy-thick. I was certain there had to be a dirtyred mower in the coffin-cramped shed. That was where my father had left it last summer. And—

\--Oh, Ariane, a woman with a deep nightdark voice said.

No, it wasn’t a woman. I knew that even before I turned to see him. He had been sitting on the old driftwood bench on the other side of the yard (where I ought to have noticed him when I came out), but now he stood up. He wore a shiny-sleek black vintage silk dress, with a small debutante pearl necklace. His mouth was bruised with burgundy lipstick, and the blonde hairs on his arms glittering in the sunlight. He smiled.

I felt a mosquito’s pinpricked bite on my back, where I couldn’t reach around to get at it, but I could only look at him.

\--I ought to have known, I said. He had been there first; he had been waiting to hear me walk up the path to the house; he had beaten me again.

\--

He had been standing in front of the house when I arrived, when I came up in a hard, lurching run. And I knew when my grandmother came outside, and looked at him without surprise that he did have a reason to be there. She told me—while I just looked over at him—that he was her friend Inez’s grandson. Inez had grown up with her in the village, but she had moved to the City after they graduated from secondary school. I had heard about her before, though since she never came back to visit, I hadn’t met her. My grandmother patted at his arm with her suddenly small porcelain doll hand, and _giggled_.

\--This is my granddaughter, Ariane, she said, looking back at me. She was flushed a rosepetal red, and her voice was teasing and coy, and I didn’t know what I thought.

\--We’ve already met, he said.

\--That’s right, I said, and before I could think myself out of it: --I found him in the woods. I didn’t know you were expecting him, though—

\--I must have told you he was coming, my grandmother said. I know I meant to. I am sorry if he has been teasing you. He ought to know better.

\--Oh, I do know better, he said. (And he looked past my grandmother and straight at me, with a twitch of his mouth. I thought, though only for that moment, I understood. But I didn’t smile back at him.) –But sometimes, I’m afraid, I forget.

I must have planned, when I left my house, to only stay for a few hours. But he was there, and that changed things. My grandmother made up a chicken salad, with cashews and plump green grapes she had from one of her friends, for lunch. She took a dusty old bottle of wine from her panty that I wouldn’t have thought she had. We played cards, and she played badly and absently and carelessly—and I realized that was on purpose. I watched him, but I couldn’t tell if he had seen the same thing.

\--Oh dear, she said after he won another round of castles, beating both of us. –You’re a naughty, naughty boy. But she smiled as she shuffled the cards back together.

\--You knew that I play to win, he said. I watched his fingers on the stem of his wine glass, and I imagined him slipping his hand between my legs, and then, and then, pushing several of his fingers into my cunt. I had to clench my thighs tootight together, especially after his knee bumped against mine under the table. I didn’t think he could have noticed.

The sky outside the window was turning a dark inkstained blue, but it was still only early evening when my grandmother went into her room and shut the door.

You should know now, before you can think otherwise: nothing happened. I put the card deck back into the kitchen drawer, and he put another log on the fire. I had to call my father (yes, my grandmother had a number on the old party line, though only because my parents paid for it) and ask him to come get me. He told me he would drive, and he would meet me at the fork in the path. He was sitting back on the sopha with another glass of wine. Before I left, he said: _I hope we can meet again, Ariane_.

I don’t know how I managed to stay calm, and not tell him how much I wanted the same thing. Instead, I only said: _Perhaps_.

I remember that when I went outside, the moon had riding up high above the trees. It was flushed with saint-halo light, and was swollen almost half full.

\--

He sat down on that same sopha in the sitting room, and I set my bag down on the kitchen table before I came over and joined him. He didn’t touch me, not yet, and I hadn’t quite figured out how to encourage him. It was hot with stale, oven-glow heat, even after he had opened the one window. I hadn’t been inside long enough before to mind, but oh, I did now. My skirt felt too heavy with that heat, and I pushed it up around my knees, and tried to feel the air from the window. I hadn’t seen any more mosquitoes, but there had been at least one, because a bite had just started to itch on my thigh.

The perfume scent was gone. I wasn’t certain it had ever been there. The house smelled only like box cardboard and sunlight, like the months it stayed shut up.

He crossed his legs, and I noticed he hadn’t shaved them. (And I felt a drop of sweat crawl through the velvetsoft hair that had grown on my calves over the past year.) His fingernails were short and plain. –It doesn’t look as though there’s much here for you to work with, unless you want to mow the lawn. I wouldn’t bother.

\--I don’t think I will, I said. I scratched at the swollen bump of the bite on my thigh, but my fingernails were too dull. –But I should at least look around to see if there are any problems my father will want to know about. That is why I came here.

\--Of course, it is, he said.

\--Then it was my excuse, I said, in a slow, lazy-floating voice. I shifted around, and my hip cat-bumped against him. He arched his dollpainted mouth at me when I looked at him, and I wished I could know what that meant. Another, second mosquito fluttered around like a tiny snowflake, and this time, when it came at me, I slapped it into a dried-dark bloody smear on my arm.

He watched me as I pushed my skirt back down, and stood up. I would have left to wash off my arm, but he touched my elbow. That was all—but it was enough.

\--I’ll help you with that, he said.

He stood up and joined me, taking a handful of my skirt as he held me in place in front of him. I pushed his legs apart with my knee. He kissed my shoulder, just under my thin silk camisole strap, before he licked the blood and sore-itch on my arm. I could still feel the heat, and a mosquito whining near my ear, but mostly, I felt his tongue.

Then he bit down, hard enough to hurt, but careful enough that I knew he didn’t mean to break through the skin. I jerked back, and—

I don’t know what he would have said, because I leaned back in and kissed him. I had never kissed anyone wearing lipstick before, and I tasted that before I could taste him. His mouth tasted like mint tea. He responded, and pushed into the next kiss. My breasts pushed close against him, and I tangled my fingers in his hair. I caught his lower lip between my teeth, but only for a soft dull bite. I couldn’t do any more than that. He moved his hands down my back, and then he cupped and squeezed my arse.

After a while, I moved away, and: --Who are you when you’re not here?

\--You know, he said. I have an office job, and I live in a flat across from the park. I do what most people do. But it only has to matter if you want it to.

\--You’re right, I said, and kissed him another time before I stepped away. I don’t know how I made myself remain that calm. My breath shook when I exhaled, and I was already, and that quickly, wet between my legs.

I wouldn’t actually see him move. You haven’t seen him, or you would know why. The next thing I knew, he was standing with me. –I do hope no one is coming.

\--Hardly, I thought I said. He reached behind him and undid something, a zipper, on the back of his dress, and then it dropped down to the floor. He wore silly midnightsilk knickers, or panties, underneath (and yes, I had wondered about that)—he hooked them with his thumb and pulled them down and stepped out of them. His cock was stiff, and his pubic hair was dark, almost black. He still wore the pearls. He was as pale as I had known he would be, and there was a silver ring through one of his nipples.

And I wondered, before I could stop myself: if this was what my grandmother had seen that night, after I was back safely at home. A man, the most beautiful, naked man, his eyes bright with the reflected moonlight, and hunger—

\--It is so much easier this way, he said. He pushed the fainted heap of his dress and knickers aside with his foot. He didn’t need them anymore.

\--

Then he sat at the end of the bed in the small guestroom upstairs. I would have closed the door, but he left it open. He watched, and I knew he watched, as I got out of my clothes. The white light from the window was soft on my skin as I pulled off my shirt, and then pushed my skirt down. I had left my boots downstairs. I could have gone over to him when I was naked, and yes, I wanted to, but I made him wait. I crossed my right arm over my chest, and slid my hand down over my breast. I stared past him as I rubbed at my button-stiff sleepypink nipple. It was only my hand, but I had to do, and feel, something.

\--Oh, I didn’t know you could be such a tease, he said, in a mocking-coo. But I knew, without letting him know I had seen it, that he had smiled.

\--I learned it all from you, I said. Then I pushed him down across the bed, into the clean snow-bright sheets He was sleek and wild beneath me and that moment, that first moment, when I felt his skin against mine, was almost too much for me to bear. I gasped when he grabbed a handful of my hair and pulled me down to kiss me, panting and messy and hard, and we kissed, and kissed, and kissed.

He moved so quickly I hadn’t the time to see it before he had tossed me over onto my back. He loomed over me, his hair falling down around his face. –You’re so sweet.

\--You’re not so bad yourself, I had to say.

He stroked my cheek in a snowfall light touch, before he reached down and gave my nipple a slight tweak. –Tell me what you want, Ariane.

\--But— I said, and if I hadn’t known before that, I did now—this time, this time, I wouldn’t manage to be in charge. –You already know that.

When he tweaked my nipple again, it was a hard clothespin pinch, and it hurt. –I meant what I said, my love, my sweetheart.

\--Fine, I said, when he waited. –I want you to fuck me.

He leaned down and kissed me once and hard on the mouth. His hair brushed against my face in a spider leg tickle. –Oh, I will.

He kissed my neck, with a slight, teasing nip, before he bit down hard and sharp enough to hurt. He moved on down and kissed my breasts, and it was so sweet, so melting-sore and hardly bearable, especially when he sucked my nipple. He didn’t use his teeth, but I still felt them. I shivered, a tiny mousesqueak between my clenched teeth. I dropped my hand onto his shoulder. Then he went on and kissed my stomach, and then again, lower down, and I arched up and opened my legs.

I couldn’t see him as he got down between my legs and kissed me there, prim and proper without his tongue. He licked me, bumping his tongue in against my hole, before he touched my clit. I could hardly breathe. It was stiff and sore, and he must have known that, because he gave me several small flameflick licks before he started to suck it.

_Oh_ , I said, or thought I did, as I looked up at the ceiling. I brushed my chapped-rough heel over his back, and pulled him in closer, closer.

I know (even when I don’t think about it) that I can’t trust him. But I knew, as he sucked me, as he fucked me with his tongue—without thinking, without any doubt—that he would let me come. He could have teased me, until I growled at him and he had to placate me. But that day, that moment, we both wanted the same thing.

\--

When I woke up the next morning, he was gone. He must have left hours before. He had folded his dress neatly together on the sopha, with the knickers tucked inside. It had rained during the night, and there were pawprints across the mud-damp path.

\--

My mother was out in her garden when I came back. She didn’t ask me where I had been, because she already knew—I had been only a few miles away at my grandmother’s house, and then I left to meet my friend in the village. She must have seen the love-bite that was blooming on my neck, but she would never mention it. She had warned me years before, and she preferred to think that I had listened to her. My hair was ratty, and I could feel all the other bitemarks he had left on me. My grandmother was sitting in the living room near the window light, knitting a mossy green thing.

Once, I would have been able to tell her a little of what I’ve just told you, and she would have understood. But now, I didn’t even tell her I was there.

The kitchen stove clock blinked to the next minute. I set my bag down on the counter, and reached around inside it until I found the note. It was torn off the back off an old sunburnt romance he must have found in my grandmother’s closet, and left on the kitchen table; he had used the pen in my bag to write, in his thorn-sharp, oddly neat handwriting: _It can be your way next time. 098-432_.

He had left me his phone number. That was the first time I knew, as I touched the stiff hickey on my neck, that I would see him again.

I folded the note in half. The trees just outside the window shook in a breeze, but there was nothing moving in the shadows between them. It wasn’t time. And yes—perhaps that night I saw a glimpse of a grey-white wolf, a wolf whose eyes glowed at me before he walked back into the forest. I thought I did. But I will never be certain enough to know.

 

*


End file.
